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Rethink 

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Business case

Impact on the availability of resources as well as their effect on living organisms, ecosystems, and components of the environment.

Ecological Impact

Reduced use of virgin materials and/or an increase of the use of secondary and bio-based materials

Reduce Material Consumption (SDG12)

Extracting resources and processing them to produce materials for use bysociety

Materials and Fuels

Extracting resources and minerals from the earth, such as coal, oil, gas, iron, bauxite, sand, clay, etc.

Mining

Utilise waste streams as a source of secondary resources and recover waste for reuse and recycling

Use waste as a resource

Reuse, repurpose, and recycle waste streams within other industries

Valorise waste streams - open loop

Cycle strategies aim to cycle and reuse materials at their highest value: they maximise the volume of secondary materials re-entering the economy, ultimately minimising the need for virgin material inputs and therefore also narrowing flows. Of course, virgin materials will always be needed to a degree: all materials degrade and can’t be cycled infinitely, use energy, and require blending with virgin materials to maintain strength and functionality.

Cycle

Impacts

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Industries

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The principles of a circular economy concern designing out waste, regenerating ecosystems and keeping items in use. Decoupling the economy from material flows—improving the rate of resource productivity faster than the economic growth rate—is also a consistent guide. By evolving with the growing number of applications of circular economy principles, and consolidating these strategies across thematic areas, Circle Economy’s Key Elements Framework (KE) renders the elements of the circular economy salient and serves as a basis to derive contextual strategies and interventions. 


The Framework consists of:
- Core Elements: Activities directly handling product or material flows; and uniquely,
- Enabling Elements: those that remove obstacles for core actors.


Key elements of the circular economy

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Circle Economy's framework of strategies and activities that define the circular economy

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Based on the work of [Bocken et al. (2016)](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309699661_Product_design_and_business_model_strategies_for_a_circular_economy), the Four Flows Framework serves as a simple framework for managing resource flows in a circular economy by using less (Narrow), using for longer (Slow), using again (Cycle), and using clean, regenerative materials and energy (Regenerate).

These different principles of circular economy can be applied to our socioeconomic metabolism: we can design stocks like buildings, infrastructure, machinery, and vehicles to be rich resource mines for the future, and design manufactured goods and consumables to be cycled and made regenerative. Furthermore, the focus must also centre on getting more value out of fewer materials. Achieving the aims of a circular economy—minimising material use, regenerating the Earth, and preventing material losses—can be done through these four key strategies mentioned above.

Source: Circle Economy. (2023). *[The circularity gap report 2023](https://www.circularity-gap.world/2023)* (p.22). Amsterdam: Circle Economy. 

Four Flows Framework

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 Refining the circular economy for battery materials. As the e-mobility transition accelerates, demand for critical minerals is growing exponentially. Companies on the cutting edge, such as Tesla, are already experiencing shortages. However, to extract ever more minerals by mining and dispose of the waste in landfills, would be to continue the practices that got the world into its current environmental mess. Furthermore, expanding mining operations here in the US is often extremely difficult, due to permitting regulations and logistical challenges. Fortunately, large amounts of the critical minerals needed for the energy transition are already in circulation today. Increasing the efficiency of recycling offers a way to “close the loop,” creating a circular supply chain that can provide the needed raw materials for batteries and other components and minimizing the need to expand the world’s mining operations. Nth Cycle works with battery recyclers and miners to recover production-grade critical minerals from separated electronic waste and low-grade mine tailings. The company says its electroextraction technology—an alternative to the more traditional methods hydrometallurgy and pyrometallurgy—enables customizable, mobile, clean and consistent recovery of critical minerals. Charged spoke with Megan O’Connor, the founder and CEO of Nth Cycle, about the company’s process and how it fits into the recycling industry. Megan O’Connor: My background is in environmental chemistry, and I got my PhD in civil and environmental engineering. While I was at my PhD, that’s actually where we developed the core technology. My co-founder Chad Vecitis, who’s now our VP of R&D, was a full-time professor at Harvard and actually developed this technology over 10 years ago. I had him on my PhD committee and [we adapted] the technology for metals recycling specifically, so that’s how our core technology for Nth Cycle came about. We started the company in 2017. We actually use a combination of electricity with water filtration. That’s really where our core IP is—combining these two technologies in a process called electroextraction or electrowinning.  Charged: Tell me about the capabilities of your technology, and how it differs from what came before it. O’Connor: We like to call ourselves a metals processing company. We’re not specifically in the battery recycling space, or the mining space—we cover all feedstocks across the supply chain. Our true mission is to enable a very low-impact, streamlined supply of all critical minerals for the energy transition. We work with battery recyclers, mining companies, refineries, and everything in between, looking at all feedstocks to solve this critical issue of supply chain management. Compared to some of the folks you see in the battery recycling space or the mining space, who use traditional hydrometallurgy and pyrometallurgy, we are a replacement or enhancement to those, with a technology called electroextraction.  Our electroextraction technology is very modular. It has what I call the three Cs: it’s clean, consistent and customizable. It has a wide variety of locations that we can deploy in, and that really helps us take advantage of the different feedstocks that North America has to offer, and tap a lot of these valuable resources that we haven’t been able to go after in the past. We can also reduce greenhouse gas emissions by over 75% compared to traditional hydro and pyro, and create a very consistent output. It’s really critical, especially in the battery recycling space, where you get a wide range of feedstocks coming from different cathode chemistries, to be able to produce a very consistent output. Charged: How exactly does your electroextraction technology complement traditional hydrometallurgy and pyrometallurgy processes? O’Connor: Pyrometallurgy you can think of as a large furnace—really high-temperature, high-pressure furnaces that take the waste, burn it into ash, and pull out the metals as slag. Hydrometallurgy is where they take the waste and dissolve it in acid, and then follow that up with solvent extraction. They use a number of different solvents to pull out these metals, one by one, to produce the final battery-grade material. How our technology differs is, we don’t use any high temperatures or high pressures or solvents to pull these metals out. We actually use a combination of electricity with water filtration. That’s really where our core IP is—combining these two technologies in a process called electroextraction or electrowinning, which is used very frequently in the mining and refining space. You can think about pushing electrical current across a very large filter, and that electrical current helps us capture the metals selectively. That’s really how our technology differs from the hydro and pyro, and helps us get to those very little operating costs, because our only input is a very low level of electricity that can come from a hundred percent renewable, versus the high chemical and energy use of the other two. Charged: How does using electricity and filters capture the specific materials you want? O’Connor: We can actually tune the voltages that we apply to our system, so we’re playing with the reduction potentials [the tendency of a chemical to acquire electrons from or lose electrons to an electrode] of the metals themselves. Each metal has a different attraction to different voltages that you apply, so depending on how we apply those, we can actually select for the different metals as we apply a different voltage to each filter that we have in our system. By combining the two processes, we’re turning it from a batch process to a flow-through, continuous process. You can imagine a basic water filter, like you’d use for well water or a pool, and we’ve simply figured out a way to electrify it safely. So, we push the fluid through, like we’re filtering water, but then we apply that voltage across [the filter], the metals precipitate out selectively and fall to the bottom, and we can collect them from there. Charged: What kind of materials are the filters made from? O’Connor: That’s part of the innovation—using a carbon-based filter in our system, instead of using traditional filters you’d see in filter presses. That’s how we’re able to get the very low operating costs, as well as significantly reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Using a carbon filter is our key enabler in this entire process of using electricity to produce these metals, so the reduction in the volume of chemicals that we use by using this filter instead is how we reduce the greenhouse gas emissions. We did not design it specifically for this. These are filters that are used in a wide variety of other applications, and we adapted it for this application ourselves. We do not make them internally. Charged: In the other applications they’re used in, are they used with this kind of electricity across the filters, or is that something new? O’Connor: That is something new that we do. They are used in a couple other different applications in the fuel cell battery space, but we specifically use them for this water filtration application. Charged: In a typical lithium-ion battery recycling process, would this be an added step that would help what’s currently used, or would it replace things? O’Connor: We can do both, and it depends on the battery recycler. We sort of see them in two buckets. We have the legacy recyclers, who have been around for a while, recycling other types of batteries, and have moved on to lithium-ion. They’re really good at logistics. They collect these materials, and then they shred them down into what’s called black mass. This black mass is a mixture of the cathode and the anode. It’s a lot of graphite, and then the metals of interest like cobalt, nickel and manganese. Right now, these folks are losing money on this product, because it’s not worth very much. What we’re doing there is actually adding our process on, to upgrade that product to a much more valuable battery metal product for them to sell. Then you have folks who are more vertically integrated in the space, who are going all the way from collection to producing the battery sulfate materials, which are going directly back into manufacturing, and there we can actually slot in right in the middle. So that would be, not necessarily a replacement, but an enhancement to increase the quality of the product in the middle of their process to make their other unit processes much more efficient. They have a hydrometallurgical step at the end to produce a sulfate, and we can significantly reduce the emissions and the energy use required for that final step by coming in in the middle and helping to upgrade that mid-grade black mass. It is a significant cost to them to transport all of that mass when only 20% of it is valuable, so the real value we bring is a very effective, clean way to upgrade this material The big value that we bring, to both parties actually, is a significant reduction in transportation costs. Both parties have to ship this black mass to a different location, whether they’re selling the black mass or transporting it to another site internally to process. It is a significant cost to them to transport all of that mass when only 20% of it is valuable, so the real value we bring is a very effective, clean way to upgrade this material—not only to reduce the transportation costs, but also, for the legacy recyclers, to drastically increase the price of that final product. So, it’s going from a waste product to a suite of valuable products for them to sell. And for the vertically-integrated folks, a much higher-quality product that goes into their final refining stage. Charged: So, at the locations where the batteries are broken down to black mass, you will install your system, separate out the valuable things, and then ship those.  O’Connor: That’s right. Our core value to them will be a much more efficient, cleaner way to process that black mass into these separated valuable products. Charged: What materials can you extract with this technology? O’Connor: We recover cobalt, nickel, manganese, graphite and copper. Charged: Do those come out as a usable product, or do they have to be processed? O’Connor: Those come out as usable products, and they’re metal hydroxide powders. Charged: What phase is the company in? Are you in production? Do you have these systems in any active lines? O’Connor: We’re actually ramping up to deploy our first two units in the field in early 2022. Our first couple of partners are in the recycling space. They’re folks that are in the logistics game, who have collected this material, and we’re going in to upgrade it to a more valuable suite of metal products. Charged: Other than batteries, are there some other processes that you’ll use this technology on? O’Connor: Yes. We are also looking at projects in the mining and refining space, working with mining companies who are looking at new ore bodies, especially in the United States and Canada. There’s a lot of cobalt and nickel assets here that have not been able to be tapped, because the technologies are either too expensive or can’t fit within the permitting regulations in each state. And so we’re looking at those to go onsite and actually upgrade the raw ore, to create more supply of these critical materials here in the States, so we don’t have to rely as heavily on overseas supplies. Charged: Will you be producing the systems, building the equipment and everything? O’Connor: No. We have our internal system that we scaled with, but at that scale, we will do all contract manufacturing. Our model is to own and operate these filters on-site with our customers, but not actually sell the units themselves. Charged: What are the next steps for the company? Are you out there actively seeking partners, or is there still technology development to do? O’Connor: We are actively seeking partnerships, especially in the mining space. We are also actively fundraising to deploy for our first couple of projects beyond the pilot. We’re hyper-focused on the North American market, because it’s such a critical piece, I think, in creating a circular economy, and not only that, but really reducing the risk that the manufacturers here face, relying so heavily on overseas supply chains, because there will be a significant gap in the supply of all these materials. If we truly want to reach our goals of electrification over the next decade, and even beyond, we really need to find an alternative source.  This article appeared in Charged Issue 56 – July/Aug 2021 – Subscribe now.     

26 Sept 2022150 | Durable Durations | PowerGen International ’22 (Live)We discuss the tools for long-duration energy storage with panelists from Burns & McDonnell, ESS, and Rye Development. Recorded live for the PowerGen International show in Dallas. For presentations, pictures and more info, visit http://www.energy-cast.com/150-pg22.htmlPage 2150 | Durable Durations | PowerGen International ’22 (Live)We discuss the tools for long-duration energy storage with panelists from Burns & McDonnell, ESS, and Rye Development.  Recorded live for the PowerGen International show in Dallas.  For presentations, pictures and more info, visit http://www.energy-cast.com/150-pg22.html

 The clean energy economy is here and ramping up in full force. Solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and electric vehicles are becoming mainstream and cost effective, allowing us to transition much faster away from fossil fuels. But with this transition comes a new set of concerns, such as the supply of critical minerals and e-waste management. Both of these concerns reveal an often-hidden side to the clean technology revolution.
First of all, critical minerals such as cobalt, lithium, graphite, manganese, and others are the building blocks of many clean technology applications. As it stands, we simply do not have an adequate supply of them to support our climate goals. The International Energy Agency reports that clean energy technologies are already the fastest growing demand segment for critical minerals. And meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement will increase total demand by as much as 4-6x, with batteries alone accounting for half of that growth. That’s a lot of minerals that will need to be mined and processed, with potentially steep social, environmental, and geopolitical consequences.
Secondly, even with a sufficient mass of raw materials to make all these clean technologies, what happens when all these technologies reach the end of their lifecycle? Can we keep this e-waste from swamping landfills by leveling up our ability to recover and recycle their essential components?
Third, while time is of the essence, if we are not careful we risk repeating some of the same “take, make, waste” resource extraction patterns that led to our climate crisis in the first place.
Meet Nth Cycle
“Most people do not see the dirty side of electric vehicles, wind turbines, or any of these fabulous technologies that we have — and how horrible the mining and refining processes are to get those materials,” say Megan O’Connor, CEO and cofounder of metals processing startup Nth Cycle. “We’re redefining that whole supply chain from extraction through manufacturing so that we no longer have that dirty side to clean energy.”
Her company has developed a new approach for recovering, refining, and recycling the critical minerals needed for our clean energy future. The company, which was selected for Elemental’s Cohort X last fall, recently announced the closing of its $12.5 million Series A financing.
 
What is electro-extraction?
Nth Cycle’s technology uses a process called “electro-extraction” to recover critical minerals from dead batteries and mining waste streams. This process, which was originally developed by Nth Cycle cofounder Chad Vecitis for wastewater treatment, is vastly cleaner than the traditional metals recovery processes of pyrometallurgy (which incinerates materials in warehouse-sized furnaces) and hydrometallurgy (which dissolves them in harsh chemicals). Nth Cycle’s electro-extraction alternative, on the other hand, works essentially like an electrified Brita filter that can be tuned to separate out different metals.
Megan broke down the process for us, which starts with lithium batteries or other e-waste materials that are pre-processed and shredded, then fed into Nth Cycle’s modular system, which is about the size of a volleyball court.
“Imagine a deck of cards where the water flows through, and each card has a different electric current that is applied,” Megan says. “Each metal is attracted to different currents, which causes them to separate.” Each card is then scraped to recover the different critical minerals. Once this is done, recyclers and miners are left with production-level feedstocks that can be sold and manufactured into new batteries, solar panels, wind turbines, and more.

Climate Impacts
Recycling minerals from e-waste presents an array of climate concerns. For one, the traditional methods for recycling and refining mineral waste — known as pyrometallurgy or hydrometallurgy — are antiquated, expensive, and extremely carbon and chemical intensive. In addition, much of the world’s refining capacity is in Asia, which means that minerals are often shipped back and forth multiple times across the full life cycle from production and manufacturing to waste management. As the industry looks for cleaner, more decentralized solutions, Nth Cycle’s technology offers a circular framework for a smooth, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly energy transition.
But efficient recycling techniques are only part of the solution. Until enough minerals are in circulation, mining will remain a reality. And so will the severe environmental and social concerns that often come with today’s mining practices
“Even if we recycled 100% of lithium-ion batteries in 2030, that only gives us 10% of the cobalt demand for that year,” Megan says. “Nth Cycle is redefining the way we process minerals out of the ground and out of waste so that we can have those materials to continue the transition, but not create all the waste that is associated with the traditional technology and refinement practices of today.”

Instead of creating more waste byproducts and greenhouse gas emissions, Nth Cycle’s modular technology can be installed on site at the mines or battery recycling facilities. This results in a much smaller footprint in terms of size, carbon, and capex required to scale. In fact, Nth Cycle’s technology can reduce costs and greenhouse gas emissions by 75%.
“If we were to implement Nth Cycle in both the mining and recycling sectors, we could save 3.8 gigatons of Co2 by 2050,” Megan says. That is the CO2 equivalent of burning 427 billion gallons of gasoline or 4 trillion pounds of coal.
Policy Tailwinds
To support the goal of 100% clean electricity by 2035, the Biden-Harris Administration recently announced that the Department of Energy (DOE) will invest $3 billion from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to “fund battery materials refining and production plants, battery cell and pack manufacturing facilities, and recycling facilities that create good-paying clean energy jobs.”
By focusing on battery manufacturing and recycling projects to prepare for surging EV and storage demand, the DOE and Elemental share a perspective that entrepreneurs are key catalysts for the energy transition. Another little-known fact is that there are numerous cobalt and nickel deposits in the U.S., contrary to the view that they are primarily found overseas. Nth Cycle’s technology will be critical in enabling a cleaner domestic mining effort and delivering loads of new jobs.
Nth Cycle is perfectly poised to capitalize on this moment and pave the way for a more secure, reliable, and safe production of batteries. This path keeps precious metals in circulation while meeting the increasing demand for battery production and storage.

Market Opportunity
In 2020, the market for recycling critical minerals in batteries and mining was $78 billion in North America and is expected to grow to $167 billion by 2030. Nth Cycle has been developing their technology for the past 10 years and is now on the path to full commercialization.
With this recent injection of capital Nth Cycle plans to scale their first pilot project and grow the team so within 5-10 years the entire refinement industry will be green, cheap, and efficient. Nth Cycle cleaning the dirty side of clean tech, from the mine to the end consumer and every step in between. Check out their recent press release for more information. 

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Nth Cycle

<p>Nth Cycle is a metal processing technology company. It has developed and deployed an electrode extraction technology to recover critical materials from end-of-life batteries and mining waste since 2017. The electro-extraction technology—an alternative to the environmentally un-friendly status quo—enables low cost, clean recovery of the critical minerals needed for new lithium-ion batteries to power a clean energy future. The company was co-founded by Megan O’Connor on the basis of research for her university thesis.</p>